10 Scariest Summer-Based Horror Novels Ever

The skill in Peter Benchley’s seventies page-turner is that it’s set in a locale we associate with fun and frolics (the seaside) and its monster straight out of a textbook. The beefed up great white shark plaguing the residents of Amity Island could well have been taking a nibble out of bathers over at Barry Island. It was a premise that helped sell books by the bucket load and still unnerves readers, as well as spawning a blockbuster of bestial proportions.

Containing some intriguing subplots not seen in the movie – there’s a mob element unexplored by Spielberg, as well as an affair between Richard Dreyfuss’s Matt Hooper and Ellen Brody – the allure of Jaws is its aquatic scare pieces, with Benchley’s knack for no-nonsense and brutal prose shedding a different light on that opening night time swim, the shark’s first daylight attack on a packed beach and a darker finale altogether.

Benchley ended his days regretting the negative depiction of sharks that he’d created, but, thanks to this classic monster novel, folks to this day still enter those salty waters with an underlying dread that something is lurking in the depths.